Tuesday, April 13, 2010

For those of you who read MSPaint Adventures, you probably saw the blog post (is there a way to link to specific posts on the MSPA blog?) reminding you that today is the 1 year anniversary of the latest adventure, Homestuck, starting. Given that 1 year was the exact length of the previous adventure, it seems an appropriate time to muse on the story.

The main feeling I get when I read MSPA is disappointment. I started hearing about Problem Sleuth when it was finishing up, and rather than try to catch up, I figured I'd wait till it was done and read it all then (which I did, eventually). Then, when I learned there was a new story starting, I figured, awesome! I can read this one as it unfolds, and know what everyone else is talking about! People tend to use the word "epic" when describing PS, and it's hard to disagree with that. I can't say I loved the story, but it had a crazy energy and an undeniably vast scope, which intrigued me more than I can say it amused me. I certainly didn't regret reading it. Most importantly, it didn't take itself too seriously. You knew it was absurd, it knew it was absurd, but it said screw that, let's be wacky, come along for the ride.

That hasn't been the case here. The story in Homestuck has exploded - not only do we have the four different series of intertwining events surrounding John, Rose, Dave, and Jade, but we have the story of the Future Vagabonds, the Trolls interacting with everyone, some characters from the future now, skips back and forth in time, lots of new worlds - I just find it all overwhelming.

But as I alluded to before, I think the problem is that the story is taking itself a bit too seriously, a trap which PS didn't fall into. PS just fell apart into a fun ball of nonsense, but HS is taking its sweet time - does the story even feel close to a climax? If this were a five act play, I'd say we are maybe in the beginning or middle of act 3. And it's been a year! Andrew Hussie put some stats up in that blog post, and apparently PS was 1621 pages long - a record HS has already beat (1667 as of right now). But it's even worse: HS had tons of animations, tons more images, and tons, tons more words (PS: 45,000 words. HS as of now: 85,000. thanks a lot, fucking pesterlogs!).

To read HS in, in short, a greater investment of your time than PS was, and that alone was considerable (goodbye, four days in July that i will never get back!). Has it been worth it? I don't think so. A few panels were genuinely funny (usually when he suddenly reverts back to hs older, cruder drawings for comedic effect) but they were few and far between. For people who do still enjoy reading it, I'd ask you: Do you think it is funny, or do you like it for some other reason?

I'll take a break here to say something nice: The art has gotten way hecks of better, and a lot of the animations are downright cinematic in the best possible way. I can certainly appreciate the amount of work this effort is taking; I'm just skeptical that it's worth the time for the creator or for the reader.

Anyway, I'm curious for other opinions. What do you guys think of the story so far?

Part of the difference between Homestuck and Problem Sleuth maybe is that PS' digressions were so painful, and you had to just laugh at how maaaan will we never have that particular plot point resolved how much more involved can it get!?Whereas HS seems more...well what is the basic story anyway? It doesn't seem to have kicked off yet. There's still something too world-building prelude-y expository about it.

It's to do with the structure? PS revolved around overcoming (apparently) simple problems (escape your room; exit the building; etc.) whose suggested solutions kept being thwarted or subverted until the whole scenario became this hugely convoluted baroque monstrosity of a challenge. But HS doesn't have that same "here's what we need to do OBSTRUCTION LULZ". It just keeps setting up the pieces and then cutting to new elements whenever a development is going to happen, so it doesn't have the same feeling of genuine progression (albeit a cacklingly twisted progression at that) that PS had. HS just seems like it's perpetually *about* to kick off, but first it's gotta introduce just one more other thing before anything really happens.

It's not really funny, nor do I think its intention has ever been to be funny. Hussie himself says his goal is just to make your day "a little bit more awesome".

I read it because it is epic, mostly.

I don't read it for the story, either, so much as I read it for the world. It reminds me of playing a good old-fashioned video game where the story took a backseat to the exploration of the world you were in. That's what keeps me coming back, this gigantic parallel universe Andrew has created that I want to know more about (and find out a little bit more about every day).

In short: Agree with everything you said here; think you've missed the point though. A webcomic this isn't.

I really like Homestuck. I don't understand the plot sometimes but the dialog is fascinating. I really empathize with the characters and I like reading the super complicated parts not because I do understand them but I don't. Similar to the movie Primer. The time stuff helps make the story be worth rereading. It's like Nethack where there exist multiple systems and algorithms and stuff that interact with each other in a fun way. Maybe that didn't make sense.I respect your opinion but I don't share it.

You will never be happy. Stop writing. Climb in to your car and drive to the coast. Climb out and walk to the end of a nearby peer. Tie yourself too a heavy weight and expel all breath.Then stab yourself. Make sure you don't fall in the sea. That ought to confuse whoever finds you.

Lately, I've felt Homestuck is starting to get a lot more interesting. It sort of slumped around for a while there, but I like where it's going now.

I think part of the disappointment with it may be in that we're reading it as updates come in, rather than as much of it as we can take in one sitting like with Problem Sleuth. There are certainly parts of Problem Sleuth that would get tiring as hell if I had to see them trickle in as new additions to the story, particularly towards the middle of the end or so.

Really, though, I think we're all just waiting for more Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.

I had never read a single MS Paint adventure. On your recommendation I just read the entirety of Problem Sleuth in one day. That was hilarious, but I can't imagine reading any more of that ever again, so I'll never know if Homestuck is shittier.

727 is basically a rehash of the one where he travels back in time and tells Ben Franklin not to assign electrons a negative charge. Except it's dumber, quirkier and lacks anything that even remotely approaches a funny punchline.

Hey, guys, what's the deal with newscasters misusing punctuation? And what's up with airplane food?

The best part about that comic is no one who knows the first thing about the Internet is going to type "http:\\xkcd.com" into their browser.

Which means Randall went from making fun of people who are ridiculously pedantic about stupid things to being ridiculously pedantic about stupid things in... 2 comics. Does that beat the record? Anyone have a copy of Guinness on hand?

harrison, I don't think he's being ridiculously pedantic about stupid things. I think this is another one of the "Isn't it wacky how this guy CRAZY OVERREACTED to stupid bullshit?" comics.

Oh, and of course I have to immediately think of Dilbert. Those are from 1997.

Now, to be fair, the thrust of the joke is different. There, it's about how gullible newscasters are. Still, the setup of "newscasters will believe ridiculous lies, and then the guests reveal their lies while on the program" is the same as the punchline of the October 18th strip. I like the comic, incidentally. I think it's very funny that Dogbert explains how the reporting happened, not how the performance happened.

The October 17th strip is included because I think it's funny.

Of course, the joke has been done well before that, even in Dilbert--see June 14th, 1990.

I think it helps that the actual lies in the Dilbert strips are funnier than the ones in xkcd. Dogbert starting his own cult is funny, and Dogbert starting a mutual fund where he just steals people's money is kind of funny. Some random asshole being pedantic is less funny. Maybe that's just a matter of taste.

Neither of these are anywhere near as obvious as the similarities between 726 and the two Dilberts I linked a few posts ago. But still, I think you can agree, it wasn't a huge leap for me to think about them.

Once again, I am disappointed that Randall is mining the depths of humor that were already heavily worked by newspaper comics decades ago.

It's also much funnier to me that Adams includes reaction shots, even crudely-drawn ones. Without them, the characters of 727 seem utterly blasé about the whole thing, which is kind of antithetical to wacky humor about exaggerated behavior.

But of course, Randall has to do faceless stick figures. So he can't include reaction shots.

Christ, though, even 631 tried to show that other people were shocked by the ridiculous behavior of the photographers. 727 is just them sitting there, calm and blank-faced.

(a) he's a programmer, which I guess contributes to the joke slightly in that programmers actually use both forward and backslashes. But it's not like Randall usually cares about giving his characters any motivation, or any actual character traits, so I suspect that's mostly just to make him sympathetic to the audience.

(b) the alt text presents the exact same viewpoint as the guy, completely straight. There's not even a joke apart from "Seriously, backslashes in URLs are so wrong, guys. Really, just so wrong."

Honestly, in my eyes this is the EXACT SAME COMIC as 725, except the grammar Nazi was weird and crazy and this guy is cool and awesome.

Grammar Nazi: Overreacts to someone correcting his grammar.Poochie the Programmer (as I will call him, because he is obviously half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli): Overreacts to people confusing forward slash and backslash.

Grammar Nazi: Follows people around for years waiting for them to screw up.Poochie the Programmer: Fabricates false credentials to bitch at people on live television.

I mean, this is about as much information as we get, so I don't see how we reach the conclusions:

The answer, of course, is that Randall has become (or, worse, perhaps always was) a total hack who doesn't give a shit about characterization or consistency of tone or, really, anything. If he can slap it together in half an hour and his fans beg for a t-shirt and try to put it on Wikipedia, he's happy.

See, harrison, I read the characterization of Grammar Nazi and Poochie as the same. Each one is a crazy person who goes to stupid extremes over trivial bullshit and should be an object of mockery.

Unless we make the metatextual argument that Randall is automatically predisposed to portray programmers in a positive light, which I suppose isn't that unreasonable.

Definitely agreed that it's the same thing as 725, which is why I would say that he's mocking the pedantic guy. The fact that he agrees with Poochie doesn't mean he's not mocking Poochie--Munroe himself is probably ticked off at people using literally as an intensifier.

Of course, the events of 727 are much less interesting than the events of 725. They're less extreme, less exaggerated. Instead of a guy who spends decades waiting to exact his revenge, we have a guy who does a TV interview. Instead of a guy obsessed with a widespread, recognizable phenomenon that some people actually notice and care about, we've got a guy obsessed with something that I'm not sure ever actually happens. So it's a much weaker comic than 725, although at least we can easily tell what's going on.

I'm still not persuaded, because Randall's a predictable guy, and most of his comics tend to fall into one of a few structural patterns. This one doesn't fall into the "I'm making fun of this wacky character" pattern, it falls into the "This guy is an insufferable mouthpiece worse than the hideous hybrid offspring of Brian from Family Guy and Wesley Crusher" pattern. More analysis!

Actually, I think I just realized why this doesn't read, to me anyway, like Randall's making fun of the programmer guy. And if I'm right, it might actually explain why Randy has some of the flaws he does.

Here's the thing: Randall Munroe loves his straight-man character(s). Which isn't a bad thing, since the funny man/straight man double act is a time-honored classic, and it can accommodate nearly infinite variation, so what the hell?

The problem is, he loves the straight man so much he'll almost always give the character too much to do and say. (Notice how the PPD is virtually never wacky nonsense? Yeah.)

Let's look at the last N multipanel, dialogue-based comics (which is to say that the punchline, such as it is, comes in the dialogue) and see which of them have an obvious funnyman/straight man pairing and which don't, shall we?

There are two points to be made here. The first is that Randall uses this dynamic a lot. There's nothing wrong with that per se; Dinosaur Comics runs on the same principle half the time.

The other thing is that all (or all but one, i don't remember) of the non-double act comics I listed are terrible and didactic. YMMV on how many of the double act ones are terrible, but only two are obviously didactic: 675 and 662.

This leads me to conclude that if Randall was going for anything other than fucking knowitoholism, he probably would have made the programmer more obviously crazy and the newscaster a genuine foil. But he didn't.

I mean, some of my examples are admittedly stretching it (although I think the qualitative point still stands), and I can see how you could reach a different conclusion. We might just hafta agree to disagree.

The programmer is not portrayed as some crazy dude who goes to extreme lengths to be a pedantic asshole. Look at his text and his dialog. He is portrayed as calm and rational, presenting his point clearly.

Normally I agree with carl, not today.I much, Much more prefer HS over PS, and aparrently for the same reason Carl prefers the opposite.PS was good, but the end got extrmely tiedious for me, and all the apparently bizzare and XD SO RANDUM stuff felt like a lazay reach for humour and frustrating to read.

HS on the other hand, feels a lot more polished and wholesome to me, the characters are a lot more rounded and like somone said before in the comments, this whole parralell world that Andrew's made is intracite and gorgeous.

I think the crux is that Carl and I are reading MSPA for different reasons, Carl's reading it like a webcomic, but to me MSPA isn't a webcomic, it's usually not funny every update and the parts that are funny on HS in particular, are very character driven.

I tend to treat HS more like a online story or graphic novel with undercurrents of humour, rather than a comic, where the driving force should be the humour.

As an aside, I think this is shines really well in the MK interlude, it's short enough that you can digest it easy enough, and it's got a really methodical story to it (plus that vidyagaem feel).

Tl;Dr, CARL UR REEDIN IT RONG-

new xkcd

IS a pile of shit, this is a key example of randall writing outside the reach of his self-imposed style- it took me three readings of the first panel to pick up what was actually being said, and then it finally dawned on me thet this was a NEWS SHOW. So rather than say, randall trying to demonstrate this by putting a logo in the bottom corner of the panel, or adding a camera or whatever, he draws two stick men sitting at a desk talking in stuttering syncopated dialouge about how they're newscasters and programmers.

There's basically no need for the comic to be drawn as a comic at this point, all you see is stick men sitting at a desk, both of which entirely featureless. Unless you're like me and saw deformed stickmen with huge disproportionate heads standing on a flat plane.

Tl;Dr, COmic's a pile of preachy crap with no punchline, and horrible delivery (of the non punchline)

I'm required by Interweb Law to like mspa because a friend of mine has done music for some of the flash updates. I'm liking what I've read of Problem Sleuth so far, but I put it off for a while because the community was extremely off-putting. A lot of them seem to non-ironically think that the "sweet bro & hella jeff" thing (which I guess is supposed to be crazy ironic, but I haven't independently determined that yet) is the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I routinely have to put up with otherwise sensible people yelling "I WARNED YOU ABOUT X HOW HIGH DO YOU BLARGH BLUGH MUGUGHBUBGH RFLOP" on twitter in order to continue being friends with them.

But I like this sort of convoluted broken-logic deeper-than-it-seems storyline. I was the only person who liked 12 Oz. Mouse when it was on, too.

Jukebox, that is still the greatest Pesterlog in the whole comic. And Carl, no. Just no.

HS isn't meant to be funny ALL the time. It's a story, and even the best comedies aren't throwing jokes at you all the fucking goddamn time. Unlike Randall, who is running a one-shot 3 times a week comic, where we expect a joke, HS is about the story progression. HS is about building the world. HS is about needless complexity and puppet ass.

HS fans: A complex plot is not the same as a good plot. In fact it's pretty much the opposite: every complexity introduced into a plot must have a greater payoff than the last. Really the HS plot is the embodiment of juvenile writing. Rather than allow his story to get somewhere and hence conclude the author continues to add arbitrary obstacles and digressions to postpone the progression of the plot for no apparent reason. This is how kids tell stories because they want their audience to listen to them as long as possible.

Also the characters are paper-thin caricatures who are simply the sum of a few stereotypes.

I couldn't finish Problem Sleuth and am enjoying Homestuck. I think it's badly written (try and imagine it as a text-only story; it's a fucking mess) but I like the depth of the little world he's created. It's sort of like how some science fiction is really only worth reading because it deals with an unusual type of alien or interesting speculative technology.

That's damning with faint praise I guess but it's enough to keep me checking for updates. It has the occasion amusing visual gag or conversation, but the constant self-reference has got to stop. I'm really tired of him introducing new characters, too.

He's continually adding obstacles and digressions because we're still in the rising action part of the story and (it feels like) just starting to transition into, maybe not the climax, but the moments leading up to it.

It's taking a lot longer than Problem Sleuth because it's a much more complicated story, and every piece of it needs room to be fleshed out or it will just end up a confusing mess. If anything I think that's the main problem: when you're getting this story in small pieces day by day it's hard to follow due to the the gigantic scope and complex nature of the plot. You'll receive a plot point and then get no elaboration on it for weeks. It's much easier to grasp the big picture when you can knock out large numbers of updates at once.

"He's continually adding obstacles and digressions because we're still in the rising action part of the story and (it feels like) just starting to transition into, maybe not the climax, but the moments leading up to it."

Andrew has admitted on several occasions that he hasn't completed the story, or even an outline of the story. Your sense that the story is going somewhere is an illusion: it could only be going somewhere if Andrew had decided on a place for it to go beforehand.

"It's taking a lot longer than Problem Sleuth because it's a much more complicated story, and every piece of it needs room to be fleshed out or it will just end up a confusing mess. If anything I think that's the main problem: when you're getting this story in small pieces day by day it's hard to follow due to the the gigantic scope and complex nature of the plot. You'll receive a plot point and then get no elaboration on it for weeks. It's much easier to grasp the big picture when you can knock out large numbers of updates at once."

This is a great description of a combination of bad writing, bad plotting, and bad pacing all rolled into one. It's hardly something to celebrate, and not really an excuse for anything.

"Andrew has admitted on several occasions that he hasn't completed the story, or even an outline of the story. Your sense that the story is going somewhere is an illusion: it could only be going somewhere if Andrew had decided on a place for it to go beforehand."

Just because he doesn't know how the story will end or doesn't plan ahead far enough doesn't mean the story isn't following a pretty clear narrative arc. Almost all of the exposition has been laid out at this stage, there's only one more piece of "set-up" before the "main game" starts, and who we can at this point assume to be the main villain has just completed a character arc ending in his rise to power. The stage has almost finished being set for the big battle, and I imagine it WILL be finished by the time of Act 4's finale in the next week or two.

"This is a great description of a combination of bad writing, bad plotting, and bad pacing all rolled into one. It's hardly something to celebrate, and not really an excuse for anything."

Not

Not really?

A story with more components to it is by definition going to need to be longer. The Lord of the Rings trilogy weighs enough to kill a man with, because the stories have tons of moving parts that all need to be resolved and weaved together. On the other hand, a piece of short fiction is probably only going to have one or two main plot elements that can be elaborated on and explored in a relatively short time.

Complexity and length are not inherently good or bad qualities, they're neutral, and differing quantities of each require different kinds of execution to work well. Saying that it's bad because it's complex is just as asinine as saying that it's good because it's complex. It just is complex.

I enjoy Homestuck a lot. It isn't as consistently funny as problem sleuth was by a long shot, but it's appeal is, like you suggested, elsewhere. The animated, musical updates are astounding, and if you invest yourself in the fictional world-building at all the plot is engaging. It's definitely not silly and fun like PS was, and it doesn't have a traditionally good story arc at all. The plot is more of a continual, winding thing, where the appeal has to come from each part separately combined with the exponential growth in scale.

It's definitely a niche appeal, for people who like to speculate and contemplate overly complex fictional mechanics. Based on the readership, though, it's a decently large niche, and based on the forums it's a very dedicated one.

For instance, the pesterlogs can be absolutely hilarious if you have the patience for them. But to get the full impact, you have to have absorbed a shit ton of back story from this long and detail-heavy universe. This is an admittedly large expectation, so unless you're really dedicated to enjoying this, you won't.

One thing I think is interesting is that the art HAS gotten better. This isn't really a sign of Andrew improving; he's made graphic novels before with astoundingly good art. MSPA has always been a process of suppressing his art in order to pump out more content quickly — PS would have taken a decade to make if he had actually put effort into the visuals. Homestuck's art is better mostly because he's apparently just spending more hours per day than he used to.

In any case, what I'm most interested in is seeing what he gets up to after this.

I have to say, I haven't found anything really disappointing about Homestuck. I guess I came into it with little in the way of expectations. But I was glad that it was a little less... I dunno, something about Problem Sleuth didn't jive. It was awesome and all, but a little too cobbled together for my tastes. Just one bit of weird shit after another, all piled together with not much of an attempt at a coherent storyline.

Whereas Homestuck has been less about the hilarious hijinx and weird puzzle shit, and more about the weird, crazy world that Hussie has dreamt up - in which great effort has been put into making it coherent and somewhat intelligible. And it has actual characterization, something PS had almost none of whatsoever. There is humor, but instead of what passes for "plot" being humorous because it's so weird, the humor is hilarious things thrown in on almost as an aside. Like where John hallucinates those salamanders as those people from Con Air. Funny, but not crucial.

So I guess what I'm saying is, HS is better than Xkcd because randall detracts from coherence to say something OMG FUNNY YOU GUYZ, srsly.

Maybe if you weren't the intellectual equivalent of a gnat you'd be able to keep up more effectively. It's not Andrew's fault you're so stupid and it isn't his responsibility to dumb things down for you.

Hmm it seems to me that you are approaching Homestuck with too narrow a perspective. I had no interest in the story when I started reading, but the end of the first act had me hooked enough to keep reading. The thing I really like about Homestuck is the very thing that you dislike, the excruciating detail given to every scene, the at first ridiculous, seemingly juvenile, plot points and characters masking a deeper meaning and subtlety, so that there are not only those moments straight forward entertainment, but also a great deal of depth being revealed at the same time, piece by piece. Of course the icing on the top of the cake, with the killer soundtrack, allusions to everything everywhere that give you that "ah ha" moment upon discovery (especially since he does internal MSPA references much more subtly now) and the delivery of major plot points via animation to maintain a proper turn of phrase in the story, makes it currently one of my favorite works in any medium. Oh and this is a couple months off because I just started reading MSPA recently.

Dunno about a year ago, but HS has stuck to its epic, convoluted, actually MAKES SENSE now plot and it is awesome. Who else could pull this crap out? effing yes. The fact that there is still humor is an accomplishment, I think, with all the potentially dark turns it took. Whatever it's one of a kind and kicks ass discussion over.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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